Inspirations rarely come more inspired than
Gibby Haynes, the leader of
the Butthole Surfers. For years,
Gibby slipped
Evan Dando mixtapes, and
the Lemonheads leader pays tribute with
Varshons, a covers album largely consisting of songs from those cassettes and produced by
Haynes. At first glance this pairing might seem odd, but
Gibby and
Evan are both old hardcore punks with a taste for the strange.
Evan may have crossed over more than
Gibby, who made a career out of odd, but he never quite abandoned weirdness, with even
Come on Feel the Lemonheads collapsing in the murk of "The Jello Fund." All the same,
Varshons is easily the strangest
Lemonheads record in maybe two decades and it's not so coincidentally one of their best, perched between the ragged, formless mess of their earliest records and
Dando's enduring love for sweetly weathered country-rock.
Gram Parsons,
Evan's longtime idol, surfaces on
Varshons, as does
Townes Van Zandt, but a truer indication of the sun-warped spirit of the album lies in how
the Lemonheads revamp
Wire's "Fragile" into country-rock or how scum-rocker
G.G. Allin's "Layin' Up with Linda" is given a murder ballad revision that resonates. But
Varshons isn't all country -- there's a thick layer of Texas psychedelic haze, a rather ingenious take on
Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful," a duet with
Liv Tyler on
Leonard Cohen's "Hey That's No Way to Say Goodbye," and, popping out of nowhere, a stiff new wave workout called "Dirty Robot" featuring
Kate Moss on lead vocals. This sense of adventure ties
Varshons to those earliest
Lemonheads records, but the group marries that spirit to
Dando's exceptionally intuitive interpretive skills, turning the album into a bit of a rough, unpolished gem. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine